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Microsoft Software Windows

Microsoft's Get Windows 10 App, KB 3035583, Reappears (infoworld.com) 328

An anonymous reader shares an InfoWorld article: Once again, Microsoft has unleashed the GWX Kraken, with no explanation and no description. The latest KB 3035583 appears as a "Recommended" optional patch for Windows 7 and 8.1. Those with Automatic Update turned on and "Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates" checked -- the default settings -- will see the patch as a checked, optional update, and it will be installed the next time Automatic Update runs. If you previously hid KB 3035583, it's now unhidden. I'm sure there are a dozen people on earth who still have Auto Updates turned on, "Recommended updates" checked, and who haven't yet accepted Microsoft's kind invitation for a free copy of Windows 10. This one's for them. In late March 2015, Microsoft released the first version of KB 3035583. Described as "Update enables additional capabilities for Windows Update notifications in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP1," the patch immediately raised eyebrows. In April of last year, a German researcher named Gerard Himmelein, writing at heise.de, figured out that Microsoft was sneaking a Windows 10 upgrader onto Win7 and 8.1 machines. Life for Win7 and 8.1 customers since then has degenerated into Win10 whack-a-mole.In some other news, Chinese news outlet Xinhua reports that plenty of users in China are unhappy about Microsoft's push to get them to mandatorily upgrade their Windows OS. "The company has abused its dominant market position and broken the market order for fair play," Xinhua quoted Zhao Zhanling, a legal adviser with the Internet Society of China, as saying.
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Microsoft's Get Windows 10 App, KB 3035583, Reappears

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  • Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)

    by LichtSpektren ( 4201985 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:14PM (#52195719)
    I've had to hide KB 3035583 over a dozen times now. It's really not worth my time to micromanage this crap on every PC in my office, so I just installed GWX Control Pane: http://www.majorgeeks.com/file... [majorgeeks.com]
    • I just installed GWX Control Pane...

      Which also needs constant updating to keep up. Until this is over, the simplest thing to do is to disable Windows Update. If you don't open every attachment you receive, or click on every laughing baby link, you shouldn't have much problem.

    • by bogie ( 31020 )

      It didn't catch it for me. As posted you really to make sure and keep GWX updated and I assume use Monitor mode which I hadn't turned on yet. Not sure if it would have known to stop that latest update.

      I just happened to see there was an update, normally don't look at them since GWX was installed, and saw that fucking turd of an update trying to force it's way on to my HTPC. Would have been a real problem for me.

    • That control panel is pretty good, I recommend it also.

      I'm also a bit confused about "recommended" updates. In the Windows Update panel (the real one, not the Widnows 8.1 metro style panel), it doesn't have a category of "recommended". The lowest level category is "optional", so if KB3035583 is listed as optional then I assume that's not "recommended"? Or are all optional updates now recommended?

      Windows has the worst package management system I've ever seen. Why do I have to be concerned about Windows S

  • by MobSwatter ( 2884921 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:15PM (#52195727)

    I couldn't possibly think of a better way to sell Linux.

    • There is an interesting thread on Microsoft and the "click the red X to install Windows 10" dialog at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk] What stands out in the 200 some odd comments is the Microsoft seems to have motivated one articulate segment of its user base ... motivated them to switch to Unix.

    • by c ( 8461 )

      I don't think this will do anything to help sell Linux; Microsoft's customer base is pretty conditioned to abuse.

      However, as a Linux user, I'd really like to sincerely thank Microsoft for the wonderful entertainment I get from watching them publicly inflict misery and aggravation on their customer base. Traditionally they go after everyone else with cut-throat glee, so it's a nice to see them spread it around a bit.

      I was kinda enjoying watching their mobile strategy meltdown, but that's always tinged with a

    • I couldn't possibly think of a better way to sell OS X

      FTFY.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Probably no coincidence that Chromebook sales are up too.

  • by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:17PM (#52195753)

    Install Linux, problem solved.

  • by bazmail ( 764941 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:18PM (#52195765)
    He publicly said there will be one billion devices running Win 10 within one year of its release, and by hook or by crook he'll do it.
  • If Microsoft feels it needs to look like a malware-distributor in order to get Windows 10 on its customers' PCs, then the uptake of Windows 10 must not be as good as Microsoft needs it to be. In fact, it may be much worse, much, much worse.
  • by Phusion ( 58405 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:22PM (#52195789)
    I've been fighting off this upgrade on my network at work for months now. I deployed a GPO with a template MS provides to stop the forced upgrade of Win7 machines to Win10, but I still see that damned little icon on my user's system tray. I don't condone, but understand their strategy for pushing out Win10 to home users, they don't want another Windows XP, where a popular but mostly out of date OS keeps a small, bug significant chunk of the market long after support ends. What I don't understand is forcing this update on domain joined machines that are obviously part of a business network and the upgrade should be left up to the sysadmin (me). I know there's little love for MS on this site, but they have gotten worse and those of us working in enterprise/domaine environments shouldn't have to employ registry hacks and GPO templates to keep our client machines from forcefully being upgraded to the latest OS.
  • Don't accept abuse. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:30PM (#52195873) Homepage
    It amazes me that people have been so accepting of Microsoft's abuse.

    3 ideas:

    1) Autopatcher [autopatcher.net] has not begun supporting Windows 10. We need independent control over Windows operating system updates. How can we achieve that?

    2) Don't let Windows connect to the internet. Microsoft has a long, long history of releasing very buggy code and fixing it later. After fixing 2,722 vulnerabilities and bugs, Microsoft declared Microsoft Windows XP "end of life" [futurepower.net].

    3) We need international support for a Windows-compatible operating system, like ReactOS [reactos.org].
  • by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:31PM (#52195889) Homepage Journal

    This is plain bad marketing strategy. Microsoft Windows 10 is actually a decent operating system, unlike that shit slab Windows 8.1 and the status-quo Windows 7. I tried Windows XP and went *back* to Linux, and that was freaking Mandrake 8; Windows 7 wasn't much of any kind of improvement, and Windows 8.1 was just "has the right APIs to run Unity 3D". Windows 10 surprised me enough that I sometimes stay on it as a casual OS rather than flipping back and forth if I'm doing a bunch of things *and* Unity 3D; so why aren't they playing up all the incredible improvements in Windows 10 as a migration strategy, rather than annoying the user into submission?

      • the 107 domains that the OS sends your personal information to

        Every report I've seen about that has had methodology I've used to show Ubuntu, Fedora, et al sends your personal information all over the god damned world, what with Apport/Whoopsie constantly uploading error reports to Launchpad, apt and yum constantly telling all kinds of servers what applications you have installed (HTTP GET pornview-2.1.3.deb WUT? It tells them my IP address too!), and so forth. There are also complaints about Microsoft's live Web search tool sending whatever you type in the Start m

        • Respondet ad telemetry & spying: Ubuntu IF EXPLICITLY TOLD TO DO SO will deliver crash data to Launchpad. Ubuntu also communicates across an encrypted connection to Canonical's servers to get packages using APT any Snappy -- it doesn't tell the other side what you have installed or anything like that, dependency management is done locally after syncing with their repositories (think I'm lying? Go look at the source code -- isn't FOSS great?). By comparison, why the fuck is Microsoft sending my personal
          • Uninstall WHAT programs? You said it uninstalls programs so I'll use the microsoft alternatives.

            I have not seen Windows just update at a time other than at which I have specified it to update.

            apt-get update gets a list of packages. apt-get upgrade tells the server all the packages I have installed which need upgrades. apt-get install tells Ubuntu what packages I'm installing. They have a long-running history of what packages I installed, when I install them, how frequently I update, and what packag

        • Re:Bad marketing (Score:4, Insightful)

          by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @01:58PM (#52196771)

          Every report I've seen about that has had methodology I've used to show Ubuntu, Fedora, et al sends your personal information all over the god damned world

          Yes. Ubuntu sends relevant information required for the updating of the system. Microsoft sends personally harvested information for the purposes of marketing disguised as "customer improvement program". I actually really like Windows 10, but I am not even going to remotely defend this behaviour. At least with Ubuntu you can turn all the damn things off, with MS you're not given a choice.

          Mine warns me like 2 days before it does it, and tells me it's scheduled for like 3am 2 days later. It lets me delay that stuff to a date and time of my choosing, and will put the updates in when I reboot if I finish up early and decide I can restart at that time.

          A time of your choosing is sugarcoating a way of saying sometime during that night it will reboot. It will do so regardless if a program is blocking and will do so regardless of what you think your own update policy should be. Furthermore good luck to you if your computer is asleep for a few days and then you need to use it for a presentation only to sit there and have it go through it's update when you turn it on. My choice my arse. I like the ability for auto updates. I like that auto is the system default. I like that Windows 10 silently does it without much user gripe. Not giving someone the choice is indefensible.

          You sent me a link to Windows 10 installing itself as a new operating system and moving the previous OS to a C:\windows.old directory.

          Keep reading. In the process it SILENTLY removes software that isn't compatible. It doesn't give you the option to not upgrade, or warn you. It just does. This is indefensible especially given this is MS removing something that people paid money for. Do they now get a refund?

          Is Google Chrome immune from Microsoft setting its home page to Bing?

          Oh I'm glad you mentioned this, especially since every update seems to set Edge back to the default browser, and regardless of what you set your default browser too if you search via Cortana it'll open up in Edge.

          Windows 10 is a great solid OS, but some of the design decision mentioned here aren't just a letdown, they are the kind of thing that you can only come up with when smoking weed with MBAs. Speaking of weed, if you think that 2/3rds of what was posted above doesn't affect the vast majority of users then maybe you should let your own THC levels drop a bit before posting.

          • Some time during some night in the next 10 days, not "that night". When it's within 2 days, it asks me again.

            Oh I'm glad you mentioned this, especially since every update seems to set Edge back to the default browser, and regardless of what you set your default browser too if you search via Cortana it'll open up in Edge.

            I've been running Windows 10 since May, 2014 and that hasn't happened to me.

            • I've been running Windows 10 since May, 2014 and that hasn't happened to me.

              Congratulations. Yet we hear daily of a Windows 10 nag that has caused real issues out there in the world. So far I've only lost an occasional document (recovered from autosave), but the closest thing I've found was $3000 damage to a telescope when the PC decided to reboot at 3am after the owner had gone to sleep and wasn't able to issue the command to meridian flip.

              Your lovely 10 days assumes you use your PC every day. Not everone does, and those people who don't find their PC suddenly and unexpectedly reb

        • "Every report I've seen about that has had methodology I've used to show Ubuntu, Fedora, et al sends your personal information all over the god damned world, what with Apport/Whoopsie constantly uploading error reports to Launchpad, apt and yum constantly telling all kinds of servers what applications you have installed (HTTP GET pornview-2.1.3.deb WUT?"
          And I guess it's impossible to uninstall or disable abrt (so you don't get asked if you want to send crash reports), you can't change the repos used (to you

      • To be fair, your third statement is misleading. Windows may remove programs during an update for compatibility reasons. If a program is known to cause crashes, bugs, or otherwise conflict with Windows, Windows may remove it to keep your system stable. If this happens, the “All of your files are exactly where you left them” in the windows.old. This only happens because essentially the update is a "new" version of windows. It will only remove programs when updating to a new major version, or
      • Snide remarks aside Windows 10 is an awesome system that is majorly let down by those 3 shitturds of features. Underneath if it weren't for the 3 things you mention it is actually a very decent well rounded and stable system.

        4 shitturds. You forgot the advertisements in the startmenu.

  • On my system, KB3035583 - is an optional update.

    OPTIONAL Windows Updates:

    "Update for Windows 8.1 for x64-based Systems"

    KB3035583, KB3084905, KB3102429, KB3103616, KB3103709, KB3123862, KB3125424, KB3138378, KB3139923, KB3145384, KB3146604, KB3146627, KB3146751, KB3146978, KB3149157, KB3150513, KB3156418

    Microsoft Silverlight (KB3126036)
    Skype for Windows desktop 7.3 (KB2876229)

    Although I have previously installed|run UltimateOutsider's GWX Control Panel.

  • by HalAtWork ( 926717 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:39PM (#52195975)

    If you want software that helps you do what you want, then clearly don't get windows.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:41PM (#52195995)

    ... that of all the companies in the world, it was Microsoft itself who finally launched Year Of The Linux Desktop.

    • ... that of all the companies in the world, it was Microsoft itself who finally launched Year Of The Linux Desktop.

      Yeah either that or the Android desktop, where we'll apparently be expected to pay for upgrades... Or so I read somewhere.

  • by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:42PM (#52196013)

    I don't agree with how they're doing it, but the simple fact is that Microsoft is totally done supporting Windows 7 for home users. They're desperate to avoid another Windows XP-style upgrade cycle. Even getting Win7 support for businesses is getting trickier; Microsoft has basically announced that the next revision of business PCs won't natively support Windows 7, and support is limited to a very small list of business-only PCs...so they're not killing support, but just making it really hard to get it.

    I'm hoping they'll soften their stance on Windows as a Service and go back to a more traditional release timeframe, but for home users that kind of model is the right choice. Grandma isn't running crazy custom VB6 applications that can't be modernized and must work. She is, however, an inexperienced computer user who is probably happy with a remote servicing model, just like iOS.

    Under the hood and without the spyware/Cortana/Store, Windows 10 is actually a good upgrade. It has decent performance on low end hardware. Now that Windows Phone is all but dead, I'm hoping they'll start loosening some of the mobile-inspired UI decisions they made and start allowing custom theming again. The second someone comes up with a Windows 7 look-alike theme for Windows 10, I'm sure a huge chunk of users will move to 10. I skipped Windows 8 because I hated the UI so much, for example, and didn't come back until 8.1's last update.

    • Much as I hate to, I agree. With the new Spybot Anti-becon, https://www.safer-networking.o... [safer-networking.org] it is actually reasonable other then the ugly phone UI which should go away now. But I still the the options will look better in 4 years when Win7 support ends.
    • I don't agree with how they're doing it, but the simple fact is that Microsoft is totally done supporting Windows 7 for home users.

      Windows 7 until 2020, baby, 2020.

      .
      Microsoft has stated they will support Windows 7 until the year 2020. They cannot renege on that. Otherwise who would believe them when they say they won't make Windows 10 a monthly subscription service?

    • Under the hood and without the spyware/Cortana/Store, Windows 10 is actually a good upgrade.

      That is a great endorsement. If you ignore all the bad, what remains must be good. By definition.

    • The second someone comes up with a Windows 7 look-alike theme for Windows 10, I'm sure a huge chunk of users will move to 10. I skipped Windows 8 because I hated the UI so much, for example, and didn't come back until 8.1's last update.

      You seriously think people are avoiding Windows 10 because of the looks? Are you fucking high?

  • by mfh ( 56 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @12:46PM (#52196059) Homepage Journal

    Yup, Microsoft are still cunts [archive.is].

  • There are several "updates" in the latest batch that have to do with upgrading, including some in the "Optional" updates section.

    I found 3 or 4 Win 10 upgrade packages in the "recommended" section and at least 2 in the "Optional" section.

    Fucking Microsoft, how many times do I have to say "NO"?

    What part of "NO" seemed unclear the first 5 times??

    • by burni2 ( 1643061 )

      I think a feminist should teach Microsoft that "No" really means "No" and that denying a fist in the ass is also covered by that first "No".

      • I think it's both sad and illuminating how desperate they are to get Win 10 on everyone's PCs.

        Having to force the "adoption" of their newest OS is a clear indication of how few people want it, and the lengths they're going to (deception, scheduled updates, ignoring people's refusal over and over again) smack of a heavy-handed mindset.

  • This pisses me off. My wife's laptop can't upgrade to 8.1 or 10 because there are a lack of drivers, which makes the upgraded laptop unstable and unusable. I've already wasted two weekends to down grade the OS from 8.1 and 10 back to 8.0. If I have to do this AGAIN because of MSFT, I'm going to get my wife a Mac.

  • What really gets me the most, is the fact that they do not support free upgrades from Vista. Only from Windows 7 and up. If their upgrade problem had included Vista, people would have cheered them on. With It is becoming more and more common for software to have Windows 7 as a minimum requirement, this would have helped out a small number of people who basically have machines that would still be usable if not for the boat anchor of an OS.

    But no, they're forcing people with perfectly usable machines to up

  • This makes NO SENSE as a business. Let alone disrespecting your consumers you're actively HARMING many of your consumers and actively fomenting HATRED for your product let alone your brand name and for what purpose?!

    For better adware rates? Really? Who wants to buy ads on your OS that everyone hates?
    To save some money on patches and code because you only have to maintain one code base? No one wants to buy your software now so hey, you're going to save LOTS of money on maintenance!

    The only thing this poi

    • And it REALLY better not be something stupid like Nadella gets ONE MILLYUN shares of MS stock if he makes his Windows 10 install numbers...

  • The aggression with which Microsoft is trying to push people to Windows 10 makes the monthly subscription fee for the Windows service appear all the more likely.
  • What an apt description! I used to love whack-a-mole.
  • by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @02:12PM (#52196957)
    I've been trying out Elementary OS and it seems pretty spectacular so far. Much smother then any linux I have seen in awhile. Just thought I would mention it.
  • It's just the economy's Invisible Hand pushing you toward the best product!

One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis

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